Multimedia artist K8 Hardy uses photography in her Position Series (2007–12) to
explore identity as performance and construction. Hardy used herself, her
sister, and mannequins, styled in eclectic clothes, wigs, and makeup, to suggest
personas outside normative categorisations of identity and gender expression, in
tension with the ordinary domestic or urban spaces in which they are pictured.
In the darkroom, Hardy superimposed bows, glasses, bras, and the spectral
outlines of bodies over these portraits: analogue interventions that expose the
photograph as a deliberate construction rather than fixed truth. Positions
presents all fifty photographs from the cult series plus additional unseen
images, cataloguing Hardy’s pathbreaking body of work in the context of the DIY
fashion, art, and thrift scenes in queer subcultures of early 2000s New York.
Here self-objectification serves as a powerful riposte to the objectification of
the female body in life and in art and to exclusionary art institutions,
queering the conventions of the portraiture genre in an iconic act of rebellion.
